In United Poultry Concerns v. Chabad of Irvine, a group of chickens’-rights activists petitioned a federal judge to prohibit a California Jewish organization, Chabad of Irvine, from engaging in Kapparot, a Jewish ritual. This tradition is associated with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and involves symbolically casting off one’s sins. Some Jews, including the defendants in this case, symbolically “transfer” their sins to live chickens. The chickens are then killed and, typically, donated to needy families.

Except not this year, because a Poultry Rights group sued and a judge stopped the ceremony.

The judge initially granted the plaintiffs’ request and prohibited the Chabad rabbi, Alter Tenenbaum, from engaging in the ritual use of live chickens. Eventually the judge lifted the ban, but only after it was already too late for Chabad to perform the ritual this year. The damage had been done and can never be entirely remedied.

That a federal judge granted such a ban highlights a disturbing trend currently playing out in America’s public and legal understandings of religious liberty. I have written about how foes of religious liberty seek to re-categorize that liberty as an indulgence, doled out at the discretion and convenience of the majority, rather than a fundamental right that may be denied only in rare and exceptional cases. That desire is manifest in this case.Not just religious liberty. All liberty. The government needs a serious reason to curtail my rights. Except it doesn’t.

Of all the fundamental rights, those in the First Amendment need protecting first. The chicken thing is kinda weird, but next time it’ll be something else, and soon the right to religious practice becomes something they grant you, and not something you own as a fundamental part of your person-hood.

I’m already seeing references to the “right to worship” from the left. As if that’s what religious people will be left with. Just the right to stay inside church and worship there…cut off from a connection with the civic life of America.

Shorter/didn’t read: Those judges are supposed to protect your rights. If they win today by taking away your religious rights, or rites, then it will not end well for the enemies of freedom.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We also have candidates for high office who think that Catholics and other main stream Christian religions need to rethink their views on contraception and abortion and just get with the 21st Century Feminist agenda. I guess they think “free exercise” is what they deign to give us the freedom to do.

and a lot of those same candidates have absolutely NO problem with the tenets of Islam being practiced in all its graphic hideousness in any state they can get a foot hold in, while telling Christians to keep it in church and out of everywhere else.

There’s a book… okay tome… okay gawdawful anthology; that was first published the birthyear of our beloved country. The final chapters came out contemporarily with our Constitution. It’s a history. We didn’t read it.